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A Voice and Nothing More Short Circuits Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Editor

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A Voice and Nothing More Short Circuits Slavoj Zˇizˇek, Editor MD DALIM #836524 01/16/06 BLUE BLACK GRAY A Voice and Nothing More Short Circuits Slavoj Zˇizˇek, editor The Puppet and the Dwarf:The Perverse Core of Christianity, by Slavoj Zˇizˇek The Shortest Shadow:Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, by Alenka Zupancˇicˇ Is Oedipus Online? Siting Freud after Freud, by Jerry Aline Flieger Interrogation Machine:Laibach and NSK, by Alexei Monroe The Parallax View, by Slavoj Zˇizˇek A Voice and Nothing More, by Mladen Dolar A Voice and Nothing More Mladen Dolar The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or informa- tion storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use.For information,please email [email protected] or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dolar, Mladen. A voice and nothing more / Mladen Dolar. p. cm. — (Short circuits) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-54187-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1.Voice (Philosophy) I. Title. II. Series. B105.V64D65 2006 128—dc22 2005054457 Contents Series Foreword vii Introduction: Che bella voce! 2 1 The Linguistics of the Voice 12 2 The Metaphysics of the Voice 34 3 The “Physics” of the Voice 58 4 The Ethics of the Voice 82 5 The Politics of the Voice 104 6 Freud’s Voices 126 7 Kafka’s Voices 164 Notes 189 Bibliography 209 Index 215 Series Foreword A short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the net- work—faulty,of course,from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning.Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading? Is not one of the most effective critical procedures to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion), and read it in a short-circuiting way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text, or conceptual appa- ratus (“minor”should be understood here in Deleuze’s sense:not “of lesser quality,” but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideol- ogy,or dealing with a “lower,” less dignified topic)? If the minor ref- erence is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions. This is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion (short- circuiting philosophical speculation through the lens of political economy,that is to say,economic speculation); this is what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality (short-circuiting the highest ethical no- tions through the lens of the unconscious libidinal economy).What such a reading achieves is not a simple “desublimation,” a reduction of the higher intellectual content to its lower economic or libidinal cause; the aim of such an approach is, rather, the inherent decenter- ing of the interpreted text, which brings to light its “unthought,” its disavowed presuppositions and consequences. And this is what “Short Circuits”wants to do, again and again. The underlying premise of the series is that Lacanian psychoanalysis is a privileged instrument of such an approach, whose purpose is to illu- series foreword series minate a standard text or ideological formation, making it readable in a totally new way—the long history of Lacanian interventions in phi- losophy,religion, the arts (from the visual arts to the cinema, music, and literature),ideology,and politics justifies this premise.This,then, is not a new series of books on psychoanalysis, but a series of “con- nections in the Freudian field”—of short Lacanian interventions in art, philosophy,theology,and ideology. “Short Circuits”intends to revive a practice of reading which con- fronts a classic text, author, or notion with its own hidden presuppo- sitions,and thus reveals its disavowed truth.The basic criterion for the texts that will be published is that they effectuate such a theoretical short circuit.After reading a book in this series, the reader should not simply have learned something new: the point is, rather,to make him or her aware of another—disturbing—side of something he or she knew all the time. Slavoj Zˇizˇek A Voice and Nothing More Introduction Che bella voce! A man plucked a nightingale and, finding but little to eat, said: “You are just a voice and nothing more.” Plutarch, Moralia:Sayings of Spartans [Apophthegmata Laconica] 233a There is a story which goes like this: In the middle of a battle there is a company of Italian soldiers in the trenches, and an Italian com- mander who issues the command “Soldiers,attack!” He cries out in a loud and clear voice to make himself heard in the midst of the tumult, but nothing happens, nobody moves. So the commander gets angry and shouts louder:“Soldiers, attack!” Still nobody moves.And since in jokes things have to happen three times for something to stir, he yells even louder: “Soldiers, attack!” At which point there is a response, a tiny voice rising from the trenches, saying appreciatively “Che bella voce!” “What a beautiful voice!” This story can serve as a provisional entry into the problem of the voice. On the first level, it is a story of a failed interpellation. The sol- diers fail to recognize themselves in the appeal, the call of the other,the call of duty,and they do not act accordingly.Surely the fact that they are Italian soldiers plays some role in it; they act according to their image of not being the most courageous soldiers in the world, as the legend has it, and the story is certainly not a model of political correctness— it indulges in tacit chauvinism and national stereotypes. So the com- mand fails, the addressees do not recognize themselves in the meaning being conveyed, they concentrate instead on the medium, which is the voice. The attention paid to the voice hinders the interpellation and the assumption of a symbolic mandate, the transmission of a mission. But on a second level, another interpellation works in the place of the failed one: if the soldiers do not recognize themselves in their mission as soldiers in the middle of a battle, they do recognize them- selves as addressees of another message; they constitute a community as a response to a call, the community of people who can appreciate the aesthetics of a beautiful voice—who can appreciate it when it is hardly the moment, and especially when it is hardly the moment, to do so. So if in one respect they act as stereotypical Italian soldiers,they also act as stereotypical Italians in this other respect, namely as Italian opera lovers. They constitute themselves as the community of “the 3 friends of the Italian opera” (to take the immortal line from Some Like It Hot), living up to their reputation as connoisseurs,people of refined taste who have amply trained their ears with bel canto, so they can tell a beautiful voice when they hear one, even amid the cannon fire. introduction From our biased perspective the soldiers did the right thing,at least in an incipient way, when they concentrated on the voice instead of the message—and this is the path I propose to follow.Although, to be sure, they did it for the wrong reasons: they were seized by a sudden aesthetic interest precisely when they should have attacked, they con- centrated on the voice because they grasped the meaning all too well. If, in a prolongation of the stereotype, we imagine the Italian com- mander saying: “Soldiers, the town is full of beautiful girls, you can have the afternoon off,” then we can perhaps doubt that they would prefer the medium of the voice to the call for action. Their selective aesthetic interest was based on a “I don’t hear well,”1 but with a twist: usually one hears the meaning and overhears the voice, one “doesn’t hear [the voice] well”because it is covered by meaning.Yet,quite apart from their feigned artistic inclination, the soldiers also bungled the voice the moment they isolated it; they immediately turned it into an object of aesthetic pleasure, an object of veneration and worship, the bearer of a meaning beyond any ordinary meanings. The aesthetic con- centration on the voice loses the voice precisely by turning it into a fetish object;the aesthetic pleasure obfuscates the object voice, which I will try to pursue. I will try to argue that apart from those two widespread uses of the voice—the voice as the vehicle of meaning; the voice as the source of aesthetic admiration—there is a third level: an object voice which does not go up in smoke in the conveyance of meaning, and does not solidify in an object of fetish reverence,but an object which functions as a blind spot in the call and as a disturbance of aesthetic appreciation. One shows fidelity to the first by running to attack; one shows fidelity to the second by running to the opera.As for fidelity to the third, one has to turn to psychoanalysis.Army,opera, psychoanalysis? Let me take as the second—and more precise—entry into our prob- lem one of the most notorious and widely discussed passages,the first of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the last text he completed shortly before his death in 1940.
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